Featured Refresh
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Talk about whatever else is on your mind today.
I found this memorial someone left on the beach at Far Rockaway and began to think about all the lives we lost this year. So many people have died this year, not all of them from the pandemic but many of them did die from the pandemic. I am thinking about what we are doing to the planet with all our progress. We produce so much trash there is no room for it anymore. Our salaries are so low people who are working still can’t afford housing yet inflation doesn’t stop. Landlords keep raising rents yet many of the tenants are behind in their rent, yet the property taxes keep going up. There is so much going on, the earth keeps spinning, the sun keeps rising and babies are bing born. I should be hopeful and happy yet many days I am afraid. Afraid of the future for me, my children and my grandchildren. I am writing a gratitude journal and am trying to be happy and positive. I made a wedding this year, next week I am making a birthday party for my one year old grandson. We have to celebrate the good times. Life is short, I am making it sweeter.
August 2, 2021
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How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now? Tell us about your experiences, feelings, and thoughts.
For the second Pandemic year we just celebrated Passover-for-two on Zoom, separated from other seder participants by distance and screen. Our dining room table was still overflowing with beautiful china and symbolic foods, but we couldn’t share our bounty because we were alone in our home, far from our family and friends. And yet, I still made charoses for a crowd. Charoses (or, the Sephardic pronunciation, “charoset”) is the apple-walnut-wine concoction which resembles the mortar of the bricks our forefathers had to use to build the pyramids in Egypt. The story is that the Jews were slaves in Egypt. Because we worked so hard to be free, we should live and work for the liberation of all people. My charoses is made with apples, walnuts, sweet kosher wine, cinnamon sugar, and nutmeg (my secret ingredient). I forgot to add honey this year. It was still terrifically delicious. It is always a patchke (pahtch-key) to make this Passover treat. The food processor and the counter around it end up covered in sticky apple juice drippings, requiring hot soapy water to fully clean the prep space. First I chop the walnuts and add them to the mixing bowl. Then I add apple to the spinning processor, about 2-3 apples at a time. Then, all of the cinnamon sugar in the house, plus a bit more, plus plenty of sweet kosher wine. Cover the bowl and shake it up, and let it sit in the fridge for a day before the seder meal. I’ll make some more today. Enough to last through the final days of this 8-day festival. This is a sweet treat through the 8 days of bleak, flat foods like matzo and other yeast-less products. Our private celebration of deliciousness in the dark days of pandemic plagues.
April 9, 2021